After decades of trying, Turkey has at last got a starting date for EU entry negotiations. Tim Hindle (interviewed here) explains what membership will mean for Turkey, and for Europe

WHEN Europe's leaders agreed last December that negotiations for Turkey's entry into the European Union could begin in October this year, they brought cheer to some parts of Europe and fear to others. Marek Belka, Poland's prime minister, said it was “a fantastic economic opportunity” for his country, which joined the EU only in May 2004. Others were much less enthusiastic. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a former French president, said he objected to Turkish membership because Turkey has “a different culture, a different approach, a different way of life”.

Indeed it has. But so has France, and so has every other member of the European Union. The EU was never designed to impose rigid uniformity. The memoirs of Jean Monnet, one of the EU's founding fathers, quotes him on the dust-jacket: “Nous ne coalisons pas des états; nous unissons des hommes.” (We are not combining nations; we are bringing together people.) The draft EU constitution, drawn up by a convention chaired by none other than Mr Giscard d'Estaing, recalls the EU's motto: “Unity in diversity”.

Turkey's entry into the EU will increase that diversity, but not by as much as some people fear. For the EU itself is changing as it takes on board the ten new members who joined in May 2004 (ranging from Estonia to Cyprus), even as Turkey is becoming more like an EU member state in order to prepare for membership. Moreover, change on both sides is bound to continue. The Turkey of today is not the one that may eventually become the first Muslim nation to join the largely Christian EU, any more than the EU of today is the club that Turkey may eventually join.

Istanbul taxi drivers, a sure barometer of the state of their nation, know that the mere prospect of EU membership has already transformed their country. “It doesn't matter now if we never get into Europe,” says one. “Look at the tremendous changes that we have already seen just by trying to get in.”

Turkey has been trying to get in ever since 1963, when it was admitted as an associate member of the then European Economic Community. It formally applied for full membership in 1987. But its hopes rose only in 1999, when it was officially recognised as a candidate country, and were further boosted in 2002, when it was told that if it met certain conditions by December 2004 it would be given a firm date for talks to begin. By then the Turkish people were overwhelmingly in favour of membership, although different groups had different reasons. Last December, on the day after the EU set a date for the start of membership negotiations, Milliyet, a mass-circulation Turkish daily, quoted Nazim Hikmet, an iconoclastic 20th-century poet: “Beautiful days beckon us, lads, sunny days beckon.”

In a deeper sense, Turkey (or rather its ruling elite) has wanted to be seen as European for very much longer. In the mid-19th century the Ottoman empire introduced a series of reforms known as tanzimat, or reorganisations. These were modelled on European ideas about things such as property rights, education and taxes, and were meant to help the ailing empire's economy catch up with its peers to the west. At the Paris Conference of 1856 to negotiate peace after the Crimean war, the Ottoman empire was described as “part of the European concert”.

But the tanzimat did not get very far, and by the 1870s the empire was famously labelled “the sick man of Europe”. The origin of the phrase is disputed, but Tsar Nicholas I of Russia seems to have the strongest claim. Over the years many Turks have quoted this with perverse pride. They may have been sick, but at least they were part of Europe.

Parental guidance

When the empire crumbled after its disastrous alliance with Germany in the first world war, Turkey resumed its European aspirations under General Mustafa Kemal, the charismatic founder of the republic. Subsequently known as Ataturk, “father of the Turks”, Mustafa Kemal was determined to turn his metaphorical children into a nation of thoroughly modern European-oriented citizens. He was not, for instance, going to let Turks wear silly clothes such as the fez, the brimless hat that allowed them to bow their covered heads in prayer. So he outlawed the rather charming headgear and imposed a uniformity that denied his country's rich multicultural past. One nation, one language, one culture: that was his vision.

Turkish students are taken to Ataturk's mausoleum, Anit Kabir, to be taught the official, politically correct version of the republic's history. On a hill in the capital, Ankara, the great man's remains are laid to rest pointing unequivocally towards Europe, not to any religious monument in Arabia or in Turkey's Anatolian heartland.

Ataturk died in 1938 of a modern European complaint, cirrhosis of the liver. Just before the beginning of the second world war, it was not a time for pushing on with revolutionary nation-building, but for battening down the hatches. In his book, “The Turks Today”, Andrew Mango (who has also written an authoritative biography of Ataturk) says that the first concern of Ismet Inonu, Ataturk's successor and loyal follower in the early years of the new Turkey, “was to safeguard the achievements of the republic”. To do that, he had to exercise stronger controls because he did not have “the unrivalled prestige Ataturk had won...The approach of the [second] world war brought on a siege mentality and a siege economy.”

Thus Turkey turned inwards for decades, its leaders fiercely determined to preserve the work-in-progress that Ataturk had left them in 1938. Inonu stayed on as head of his party until 1972, the year before he died at the age of 89. His successor was a youngish man called Bulent Ecevit, who served as prime minister on and off for the next 30 years until he was finally ousted in the general election of 2002. A series of coups and military interventions in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997 helped to preserve the Kemalist heritage.

The great man's aura is undiminished. The new Turkish notes and coins, introduced on January 1st this year, are dominated by his image. He is on the front of every single note and also appears on the watermark. The back of the one-lira note shows the Ataturk Dam and the five-lira note the Ataturk Mausoleum. The ruggedly handsome leader, looking a bit like the actor Ralph Fiennes with wrinkles, is set to continue to shape the destiny of Turkey's 70m people in the 21st century.